[haiku-development] Re: Towards Haiku Alpha 2 or Beta 1

From: Ingo Weinhold <ingo_weinhold@xxxxxx>

To: haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx

Date: Sun, 08 Nov 2009 18:27:28 +0100

On 2009-11-08 at 12:38:02 [+0100], Humdinger <humdingerb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
> > Alpha or Beta?
>
> I think there should be another time-based alpha release before
> switching to one feature-based beta1. There have been quite some
> visible improvements since alpha1, esp. the speed of USB-devices. Maybe
> a few more driver and ATA related improvements can be focused on as
> well.
>
> Providing these fixes will significantly increase Haiku's success with
> new users/devs.
>
> Maybe even another alpha3 bugfix release will be in order. Those should
> come in short succession, maybe every 2 months.
>
> When that's covered, it's shooting for the final R1 features. Having
> them all voted upon and finally in trunk in a working state, it's all
> about bugfixing to get to beta1. When beta1 is out there's a switch
> back to 2-months time-based beta releases until the "bugfree" R1.
I disagree. IMO we should finally decide on what features we want in R1. It
makes no sense to do R1 alpha/beta/whatever releases without a plan for R1.
The whole point of those releases is to be milestones on the way to R1.
I recommend the following procedure:
1. Define the R1 feature set. Features should be organized in three groups:
must-have features, nice-to-have features (which shouldn't hold off the
release), and definitely-post-R1 features (we could even be clearer and do
a rough planning for R2 and R3).
2. Define a rough estimation/schedule for the implementation of the missing
features.
3. Create the R1 roadmap. This includes all releases we want to do until
R1, tagged with preliminary release dates.
It is totally to be expected that the roadmap will need to be adjusted as
we go along, as our "work force" cannot really be planned exactly, but
that's fine. Haiku is an open source volunteer project after all and there
are no contractual penalties to be considered.
Regarding whether the next release shall be called alpha or beta, that
totally depends on the roadmap. Usually a beta is a feature complete buggy
pre-version of the final product. We are, of course, free to still call it
alpha, if we consider the stability not worth the beta tag yet.
CU, Ingo